Valdez should know. The 59-year old makes a living as an instructor teaching people how to handle the sidecar in Havana's traffic, where riders seem able to squeeze the machines through the narrowest of gaps.

And they've built up an intense loyalty among the mend-and-make do Cubans.

A local rides a motorcycle with sidecar along a street of Havana. Photographer: Yamil Lage/AFP

"They're very practical," according to Alejandro Prohenza Hernandez, a restaurateur who says his pampered red 30-year-old Jawa 350 is like a second child.

Cheaper and more practical than the gas-guzzling, shark-finned US behemoths, the bikes are used for anything from the family runabout to trucking goods and workers' materials.

"A lot of foreigners really like to take photos of it," says Hernandez. "I don't know, I think they see it as something from another time."

Different world

Cuba lags several decades behind the rest of the world due to a crippling US embargo, so the makers' badges on the ubiquitous sidecars speak of a bygone world.

Names like Jawa from the former Czechoslovakia and MZ from the former East Germany, as well as antiquated Russian Urals, Dniepers and Jupiters.

Havana's military acquired them from big brother Moscow at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s and 70s, for use by state factories and farms. Over the years, they gradually filtered down to the general public.